John Cabot University Press

John Cabot University Press seeks to provide a bridge between European and American culture by bringing to the
attention of the English-speaking academic world important contributions to debates,
activities, and research that have recently been taking place in Italy. It also publishes
works originating on both sides of the Atlantic that, as bridges themselves, examine
relationships between the culture of English-speaking countries and the culture of
ancient Rome and Italy.

Publications

2016

Against Power: For an Overhaul of Critical Theoryby Giacomo Marramao

Translated from the Italian by Patrick Camiller

Giacomo Marramao is professor of theoretical philosophy and political philosophy at
the University of Rome III. In his latest book in the study of power, Marramao focuses
on the work of two great Central European writers, Elias Canetti and Herta Müller,
each of whom, in different periods and contexts, offered a philosophical genealogy
of forms of domination and a radical diagnosis of power, command and law.

To grasp the meaning of the transformations of power, it is necessary to go to the
roots: to the archē that originated it as a factor common to all human cultures and all historical periods.
Power cannot be suppressed: any attempt to 'overcome' it (by eliminating one or another
form of its exercise) has done no more than strengthen it. Power must, however, be
'uprooted' or subverted in its logic of identity, which is activated in the boundless
character of desire and the paranoid scene of fear and the death of the Other. In
the midst of today's global world, to trace a line of opposition to power means to
free ourselves from the alibi of objectivity and to focus instead on subjects and
their potential for metamorphosis/regeneration. This is possible only if we detach
ourselves from the ground noise of actuality and recover the broken thread of solitary
and extreme works.

ISBN: 978-1611496192

2015

Extravagance and Three Other Plays by Dacia Maraini

Translated from the Italian by James R. Schwarten

The collection includes four theatrical works of acclaimed Italian author, Dacia Maraini,
in a dual-language format (Italian/English). The works have been chosen around the
themes of distress, exclusion, and various manifestations of tragedy with particular
reference to women. The works were chosen within a modern and a historical reference
in order to give breadth to the main themes. The individual works include: (a) Stravaganza/Extravagance. The unfolding drama alludes to the Legge Basaglia (the so-called Basaglia Law, 180/1978), whose prescriptions included the closure
of insane asylums throughout Italy; (b) Camille. In this piece, Maraini offers a reinterpretation of the storied and controversial
relationship between the sculptor, Auguste Rodin, and his young apprentice/assistant,
Camille Claudel; (c) Storia di Isabella di Morra raccontata da Benedetto Croce/The Story of Isabella di
Morraas Told by Benedetto Croce. In this play, the power of literature and the written word (the implicit, culpable
"character" in this play) culminates in atrocious homicide; (d) I digiuni di Catarina da Siena/The Fasting of Catherine of Siena. Powerful relationships dominate this account of Saint Catherine's profound religiosity.

2013

Five Lectures on the American Civil War, 1861–1865by Raimondo Luraghi

Translated from the Italian by Sean Mark

The product of over thirty years of research on the American Civil War by Italy’s
most renowned authority on the subject, this study synthetically analyzes the great
drama that from 1861 to 1865 that devastated the United States and gave life to the
modern American nation. The book also highlights how the Civil War was the first conflict
of the industrial age and an often neglected premonition of the two great wars that
shook the world in the past century. The short essays presented here are the texts
of five lectures delivered at the Institute for Philosophical Studies in Naples and
published in Italy in 1997.

ISBN: 978-1611494266

2012

The Irish Fairy Tale: A Narrative Tradition from the Middle Ages to Yeats and Stephensby Vito Carrassi

Translated from the Italian by Kevin Wren

Beginning with a critical reappraisal of the notion of "fairy tale" and extending
it to include categories and genres which are in common usage in folklore and in literary
studies, this book throws light on the general processes involved in storytelling.
It illuminates the fundamental ways in which a culture is formed, while highlighting
important features of the Irish narrative tradition, in all its wealth and variety
and in its connections with the mythical and historical events of Ireland. The Irish
Fairy Tale argues that the fairy tale is a kind of "neutral zone," a place of transition
as well as a meeting place for popular beliefs and individual creativity, oral tradition
and literary works, historical sources and imaginary reconstructions, and for contrasting
and converging views of the world, which altogether allow for a deeper and more sophisticated
understanding of reality. The book focuses on stories by Yeats and Stephens, whose
approach to the subject marks the culmination of a long tradition of attempts at linking
past and present and of bridging the gap between what appear to be contradictory facets
of a single culture. This leads to a comparative study of Joyce's Dubliners, which
illustrates the universal and exemplary nature of the notion of fairy tale put forward
in the work.

Vito Carrassi is a writer and translator who teaches folklore at the University of
Bari. His main fields of research are literary anthropology, narratology, Irish and
Italian folklore.

On the occasion of John Cabot University's fortieth anniversary, we are proud to present
the fifth edition of the InVerse poetry anthology. In hosting InVerse, the University
is true to its deepest mission and commitment: to bring together Anglo-American and
Italian cultures.

2011

The anthology collects the works of renowned poets who already belong to the history
of Italian poetry, together with younger and less known poets whom we believe are
going to leave a mark on contemporary Italian poetry. The work of two well-known North
American poets, Canadian Barry Callaghan and American Susan Stewart, is also featured
in the anthology. They were special guests—with Valerio Magrelli and Mariangela Gualtieri
- of two editions of the InVerse festival entitled InVerse-Two Poets in Mutual Translation.
A brief selection of women futurist writers taken from Cecilia Bello Micciacchi's
seminal book Spirale di dolcezza + Serpe di fascino – antologia di scrittrici futuriste
further enriches the anthology.

A First Amendment Profile of the Supreme Court focuses on the nine justices of the
United States Supreme Court and determines their frames for assessing First Amendment
cases. In each of the chapters, a justice will be profiled in terms of his or her
claims during the nomination hearings and the positions they have taken in significant
Supreme Court decisions. The object of these chapters is to provide a rhetorical frame
that each of these justices would find appealing regarding First Amendment case law.
Craig Smith is director of the Center for First Amendment Studies and professor of
Communication Studies at California State University, Long Beach.

ISBN: 978-1611493610

2010

Victorian Disharmonies: A Reconsideration of Nineteenth-Century English Fictionby Francesco Marroni

Focusing on the notion of transition as a destablizing factor of nineteenth-century
society, this book explores from a new critical perspective the canon of Victorian
literature by regarding the paradigm of disharmony as an interpretative key to the
narrative production of such authors as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth
Gaskell, George Gissing and Thomas Hardy.

ISBN: 978-0-87413-090-4

2009

Nostalgia for a Redeemed Future: Critical TheoryEdited by S.Giacchetti Ludovisi

The book collects essays presented at the international conference on Critical Theoy,
held at John CAbot University on May 22, 2008. The articles in this book stress the
relevance to the present of the early stages of Critical Theory. On the one hand they
aim at the recognition of the fundamental role played by such authors as Benjamin,
Bloch and Lukacs in the shaping of Critical Theory. On the other hand they reaffirm
the fundamental importance of the works of the first philosophers of the Frankfurt
School (and in particular Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse) against the sometimes hasty
consideration of their work as outdated. Each article focuses on specific social,
political and aesthetic issues.

ISBN: 978-0-87413-072-0

Unscathed by Fire: A Young Girl and the Italian Armistice of September 8, 1943by Fiorenza Di Franco

Translated from the Italian by Berenice Cocciolillo

Told through the astonished eyes of a young girl, this book narrates the vicissitudes
that JCU professor Fiorenza Di Franco and her family endured against the backdrop
of Hungary, devastated by the tragic events of World War II. The original title of
the book, Una ragazzina e l'armistizio dell'8 settembre 1943, refers to a critical
moment during the war, when Italy signed an armistice with the Allied powers, ending
the alliance with Germany. Fiorenza's father, an Italian diplomat stationed in Hungary,
refused to adhere to the Fascist Italian Social Republic and was arrested by the Gestapo.
He was deported to Mauthausen, where he was subject to the horrors of the Shoah with
Jews and political prisoners like himself. In the meantime Fiorenza, her brother,
and her Hungarian Jewish mother lived through a series of concentration camps, escapes,
and periods of time in hiding.

"It has been said countless times that we need to educate young people so that the
tragedy of the Holocaust can never happen again. Yet, as a university professor, I
am amazed at how little students know about contemporary history. As a direct witness
to the tragic events of World War II, I am offering my story in the hopes of making
a piece of history more accessible."

ISBN: 978-0874130348

2008

The latest volume of the anthology collects the poems that were read during the third
edition of the InVerse Poetry Festival in Spring 2007. If the role of poets today
can still be that of narrating their time, each with her or his own language and mode
and individual linguistic and expressive technique, then, in the words of our honored
and affectionate guest Nanni Balestrini, poetry is still "the savage cry that tears
out strips of moldy brain." It is "...an interminable Apocalypse. Or else it is not."

2007

The anthology collects all the poems read during the two evenings of InVerse 2006
with facing translation. It is also enriched by artist Andrea Malizia's beautiful
Portraits of Poets. Malizia's photos are unusual and in a way "estranging" for their
focus on details of bodies rather than on full representations. By focusing on details,
he opens up new perspectives in the relationship between poets and poetry. The new
perspectives provided by these poems and images may or may not coincide with depictions
of reality, but are undoubtedly places where that reality is experienced in unique
and fascinating ways.

2006

This bilingual anthology is the final outcome of a project that began as a reading
of contemporary Italian poets in the spring of 2005. At the root of the project was
the desire to introduce English speakers to modern Italian poetry, since there are
so many interesting authors who are as yet quite unknown internationally. So organizers/editors
invited the poets themselves to read their work in Italian, and read the translations
of the poems in English. Thus was In Verse born.